The Library Book: A Tribute to Books, Reading and the Places Where Our Culture Is Kept.

  

A librarian friend of mine recommended The Library Book by Susan Orleans quite a while ago, but it is only this month that I sat down and started to read it.  And a very good read it is.

 

Orleans who had a love affair with libraries from an early age  set out to tell the story of the Los Angeles Public Library and the fire that nearly swept away its main branch in 1986.  She operates on two time frames.  The first is the history of the library itself, which goes back the mid-19th century. The second is what happened one fateful spring day when somehow the library caught fire, and what happened then: salvaging thousands of books that were waterlogged and/or scorched by fire, rebuilding, and trying to find who set the library on fire.  The book's ante-hero is Harry Peake, a would-be actor and big time fabulator, who confessed more than once to setting the fire, but also denied he knew anything about what had happened that fateful day.

 

The book ends with the rebuilt library open for business and under-current of satisfaction that books, library-lovers, and the great history of collections of the world's knowledge survive against sometimes stiff odds. We never learn who set the library on fire, but we don't care because the books survive.

 

Orlean wrote her book when the shift toward  internet dependence was just beginning: it was published in 2018.  We hear how people still called the library to get information, even though it was becoming very easy to Google a query oneself.  Physical books were the foundation of the library's collection and e-books were somewhat of a novelty.   

 

Time have changed somewhat. Visit any library today and you'll see that the shelves are still filled with physical books, but e-books are now an extremely large portion of collections.  The great increase in e-book use followed the Covid 19 pandemic (the American Library Association says the jump was in 2021-22. ) I know that I had never borrowed on before the Bibliothèque de Montréal shut the doors to its many branches during the lock-down.  Ever vigilant, the library system  added something like 45,000 e-book titles over night early on in the pandemic.  How wonderful it was to be able to have access to books even when I was stuck at home!

 

The habit has endured: I currently have two physical books out of my local library, and two e-books waiting for me on Libby.  I think I'd rather read a physical book, but it is very nice to be able to pull out my phone and pick up where I left off reading an e-book.  That's how I was able to read a good portion of The Library Book while on the bus or in the Métro without lugging a physical book with me everywhere.